thinking & writing on faith, life, mentoring, and motherhood
Add some higher math to your witness today. Begin with an understanding of the old equation and end with the majesty of the new. With God’s mercy, stone cold hearts will be turned to flesh, light will overpower the darkness, and the eternal result will be redeemed lives walking in Christ.
I know the temptation there is to feel the drudgery or the wastefulness of life, especially in this time of stay-at-home orders, economic uncertainty, an invisible microbial enemy, the endless waiting for a positive turn in the news, the exponentially greater hazard for those in at-risk situations (whether health, abusive environment, trafficked, in poverty).
The good news of Jesus’s reconciling and restoring acts of atonement and resurrection is reflected in the tiny minutiae of stories like yours and mine.
The gospels record 307 questions that Jesus asked those he encountered. A simple way to love your spouse better is to spend time discovering things you may not know about them, explore how they think so you can understand them better.
Some of us cope by making lists of what to do in the worst-case scenario. We bury ourselves in research and follow up on our discoveries with changes in where we shop, how we cook, what products we use, etc. Lists and rules and preventatives will save us, and we tend to think this not because they actually will but because just doing something measurable seems more productive than just doing something immeasurable, something that doesn’t have results that can be seen or quantified, something like trusting God.
Over 1500 years ago, a group of seafaring raiders from an island known in its time as “the end of the world” kidnapped the son of a wealthy merchant and crossed the Irish Sea to sell him as a slave, and in the process, changed the history of its nation and its people forever.
Weights are things which “mar communion with Christ,” and we enter into communion with our Savior through contentment and obedience. As tempted as I may be to get rid of unpleasant people, projects or situations, they are often the very thing that I need to learn contentment and obedience and to progress in holiness.
Death cannot be avoided, but the sting of death can.
There is a rock bed harder than that of the floor and walls of the Niagara, and it is buried within the soft flesh of every person born since the time of The Fall (not the Falls).
My heart was that rock bed once. Hard and unyielding and resistant to life, truth, mercy. Then it underwent erosion and battering.
Persevere, moms, “as the snail to the ark.” (Charles Spurgeon) The ark is ahead. That great deliverance beyond the flood is ours, sealed by the trustworthiness of the Holy Spirit, and we inch forward according to the pace God sets for us. I’m praying for you.
The vineyard owner could have chosen not to return to the market square. He could have chosen to go to a different market. He could have chosen not to hire anyone. Just as God could have chosen not to give mercy to anyone, he instead chose to give it to a few despite our absence of merit.
And in no way does this trample upon our rights.
#thereyougothinkingagain 